


we buried truth under playgrounds

by ODed_on_jingle_jangle



Series: shrapnel is shrapnel [2]
Category: Dare Me (TV 2019), Dare Me - Megan Abbott
Genre: Accidents, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blackmail, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/F, Graphic Description of Corpses, Heavy Angst, Manipulative Relationship, Minor Violence, Sex Tapes, Statutory Rape, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:08:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24264856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ODed_on_jingle_jangle/pseuds/ODed_on_jingle_jangle
Summary: Tacy makes a crude gesture with her hands, her forefinger and thumb forming a hole that separates as she slips her fist through.“It hurts,” she mimics, raising her voice to a nasally whine.“Tacy, I will end you,” Addy growls lowly, aware of the other girls hovering, fixing their shoes or hair, wrapping their knees and wrists with athletic tape. Her panic is a snowstorm inside of her, but she can’t lose her composure here.
Relationships: Colette French/Addy Hanlon
Series: shrapnel is shrapnel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757197
Comments: 19
Kudos: 51





	we buried truth under playgrounds

**Author's Note:**

> I swear I didn't mean for this to turn into a series. I was going to leave the last fic as a one-shot, but a comment gave me ideas...a few different ideas, but this fic is the one that won out. It's the second to last dead dove I'm gonna bang out for a min, so I can actually go and finish the more optimistic WIP prompts I have. The gentler Baddy AU stuff. 
> 
> Since it is dead dove, yeah, as always, please heed the tags.

“Meet me at Lanvers after practice.” 

Addy glances up from tying her shoe to see Tacy grinning down at her like a crazed jack-o-lantern. 

“Fall on your head this morning, fetus?” Addy finishes tying and stands tall, looming into the younger girl’s space. “Why would I meet you anywhere?” 

Tacy grins wider and eagerly squiggles like a kitten prepping for its very first pounce. She stands on tiptoe and whispers in Addy’s ear, 

“Because I know you’re fucking Coach.” 

Addy scoffs, shoving her away. “God, Tacy, you seriously need to spend less time spouting bullshit and more time learning not to kick people in the face.” 

To her surprise, Tacy’s grin remains on her face. She snickers like a spiteful pixie and confidently tosses her hair over her shoulder. 

“I have proof of it,” she declares gleefully. “I have your first time being fisted on my phone.” 

Addy’s heart stops as she’s arrested by a deluge of glacial cold. It’s like frozen rain pelting her down to the bone as her jaw falls open. She finds she cannot move a finger, cannot utter a word. 

“That’s right, I caught the whole thing on camera. You, naked, moaning and panting. Coach turning you into her little sock puppet.” 

Tacy makes a crude gesture with her hands, her forefinger and thumb forming a hole that separates as she slips her fist through. 

“It hurts,” she mimics, raising her voice to a nasally whine. 

“Tacy, I will end you,” Addy growls lowly, aware of the other girls hovering, fixing their shoes or hair, wrapping their knees and wrists with athletic tape. Her panic is a snowstorm inside of her, but she can’t lose her composure here. 

“You can’t scare me anymore, Addy,” Tacy chirps like a robin with a juicy earthworm dangling from its beak. “You’re in no position to call the shots. Meet me at Lanvers after practice, or the whole school gets to see Coach make you scream.” 

Addy swallows, clenching her jaw. 

“Fine,” she agrees tersely. 

Tacy whips around and Addy’s sure it’s on purpose that she gets slapped with the ends of her hair. 

* * *

Tacy replays the video for her in the woods. For the purpose of proving she has it, or else just to reveal in Addy’s humiliation, Addy isn’t sure. Probably some combination of both. 

“It’s your amateur porn debut as Teacher’s Pet,” Tacy gibes, mischief gleaming in her eyes. “Listen to yourself, squealing like a little piglet.” 

Addy wants to choke her. But not as much as she wants to reach into the phone and choke herself because fuck everything, Tacy is right. While it was happening, Addy hadn’t felt pathetic at all. She felt strong, herculean strong, like Coach told her she was. 

Strong enough to take it all, to feel the pleasure through the pain, even. The bottle rocket pleasure blooming through the dynamite pain when the ridge of Coach’s knuckles smashed to the internal part of her clit. The pain and the pleasure bleeding together until they were the same all consuming thing, until Addy was nothing anymore, nothing but that feeling, scorching like hot coals. 

She remembers the way Coach’s flesh felt trapped between her teeth. She remembers the tang of blood on her tongue and skin sinking under her fingernails. She does not remember sounding like this, pitiful and puny. 

It looks so different on the screen, so much different than how it’d felt. It’s like watching a side of herself she keeps closed off, a version of herself she’d never dare let the sunlight touch. She doesn’t even know that girl, really, but she does know that whoever, whatever she is, was supposed to belong to Coach alone. Shame stuffs Addy up to the brim and overflows. She finds herself gagging on it, whole body going stiff and bristly like steel wool. 

“What do you want, Tacy?” she grates out. 

“Leave the squad and take Beth with you.” Tacy dances away from her, shoes skimming through the foliage. 

“Not happening.” 

“No?” Tacy stops a few lengths away and pointedly wiggles the phone in her hand. “I’m never going to be Top Girl with Beth around, but she’s not going anywhere. Only, she’d step down if you made her, Addy. Beth would do anything for you. And it seems like the two of you would be happier on the field hockey team anyway, if you know what I mean.” 

Tacy winks and Addy balls her hands into fists. 

“So,” Tacy continues, trilling with excitement. “You sing whatever little song and dance you have to, to get Beth to follow you off the squad, and I make sure this never gets uploaded to Pornhub or sent to everyone in school. Deal?” 

“You’ll get Coach fired if you do anything like that,” Addy snaps. “You don’t want anything to happen to Coach, Tacy, she’s the one who made you a flyer.” 

Tacy shrugs. “Sure, I’ll be sad to see her go, but Beth is a bigger adversary than she is an asset. Besides, my dad will get me a new coach if I ask nicely. Do we have a deal or not, Addy?” 

“Oh, no,” Addy advances toward her and Tacy shrinks back, scrambling out of range as Addy makes a swipe for the phone. “The deal is, you delete that video and I don’t fucking kill you!” 

Tacy lets out a high-pitched peep of alarm and dances away again. She takes off running and Addy runs after her, the wind whipping her face. She chases her through the trees, hops over rocks and swerves around shrubs. 

“Give me that phone, Tacy!” 

Tacy never turns back. She keeps pumping her legs, moving like Tinker Bell, swift and spritely. Dead leaves crunch and flutter in the wake of her soles. Addy makes a grab for the ponytail swinging behind her back and only just misses, fingers grasping air. 

Eventually she gains on Tacy so much that capture is inevitable. Tacy knows it too, she zigzags out of the way and turns back around, breathless. Addy snatches the phone from her hand and fiercely clutches it to her chest.

“You stupid little weasel,” she spits, relief washing through her. She tucks the phone securely into her own pocket. “You little fucking ferret. Did you seriously think you could blackmail me?” 

Tacy bows forward to catch her breath. To Addy’s shock, she nods, folding her arms as she straightens up. 

“I still can,” she says, still panting a bit. “That’s not my only copy, Addy. I’m smarter than you give me credit for.” 

Addy goes rigid with horror. 

“N-No,” she states. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying, you ran.” 

“Because I didn’t want you to break my phone, bitch,” Tacy huffs, rolling her eyes. “I can’t stop you now. But if you do that, our agreement is void. Break my phone, and I’ll leak the video whether or not you and Beth leave the squad.” 

Tacy holds her hand out, brow arching expectancy. 

And Addy— 

Addy just explodes. She seizes the smaller girl by the shoulders and shakes her back and forth, viciously throttling until her head bobbles like one of those hula-skirted souvenirs they have at truck stops. Tacy tries to pry her off and Addy throws her to the dirt. Rage dyes her vision and she kicks her once, twice, ten times over. 

Drums her shoes against Tacy’s back, her limbs. Listens to the ragged, sucking sound Tacy makes as a kick to the stomach punts the breath right out of her lungs. Isn’t sure if the crack she hears is a twig or a pinkie finger as she stomps on Tacy’s flailing hand and grinds it into the loam. 

“I’ll kill you!” Addy snarls down at her. “Delete it fetus! Delete it all or I’ll fucking kill you!”

And Addy says this, she says it and she feels like she means it, veins pumping vitriol and heart surging with hostility. She is a live wire in the rain, she is sparking and crackling and depthlessly desperate. 

"I’ll fucking kill you," she spits like venom, and oh, certainly she feels like she means it. 

Addy feels like she means it and doesn’t realize she’s truly failed to grasp such meaning, until the moment it actually happens. She’s so enraged she doesn’t really realize where they are. It’s the furthest thing from her mind, less than the last thing that matters when the impish little goblin is holding her darkest secret over her head, could’ve already sent it to Emily or Sierra, as far as Addy knows. 

She kicks and kicks and Tacy feebly crawls away from the blows, inching closer to the edge of the ravine. When Addy finally stops, out of exhaustion more so than mercy, Tacy takes her chance. She hauls herself to her feet and bolts.

Tacy flees like a rabbit from a fox. But she’s sobbing, fat ugly tears in her eyes— tears and blood, and she doesn’t see it. Addy doesn’t see it either, not until it happens. Tacy shrieks the second her shoe finds no purchase and the noise pierces Addy’s skull like an alarm bell. 

The last Addy sees of her is her ponytail as she disappears over the lip of the ravine. 

“Tacy!” 

Addy darts forward and watches, horrified as Tacy descends. For a moment she’s airborne, limbs spastically pinwheeling, and then her body strikes the hard earth with a sickly crack. She bounces down some ways like a fucking rubber ball, goes airborne once more, then plunks into the rushing water below. 

For a moment Addy can only stare, stupefied at the splash. Then she kicks herself into gear, running as fast as she can. Addy pelts down to the spot where the land slopes more shallowly, where she can get down without breaking her own neck. All the while she thinks, _no, no, no, no._

She skids to a halt and frantically looks around. Searches for a wet ponytail, a flailing limb, listens for the sounds of freshman squalling. 

“Tacy! Tacy!” 

Addy darts about madly, and then she sees. A shape in the water, Pillsbury dough-boy pale and facedown, pushed up against a fallen log by the current. Breath catching, Addy hurries into the water, scrambling so fast she nearly slips. It’s shallow, but shocking cold and soaks through her clothes with an arctic bite.

Addy reaches for Tacy’s ankle and tugs, pulling her closer. She bobs slackly on the water and when Addy flips her over, her skin is even colder than it was the day she pulled her from the ice bath. Eerily, incredibly colder. 

She picks her up bridal style and something just feels wrong, all wrong, the ugly sound of crepitus splitting the air. Tacy’s head flops unnaturally against Addy’s forearm and Addy fucking feels bone grinding against bone beneath the frigid flesh. She stumbles and vomits, the contents of her stomach slapping the water. It clouds under the chunks and Addy trudges through as the current carries it away. 

When she reaches shore, Addy lowers Tacy to the ground as gently as possible and it still makes the worst noise when she touches down. This soft, visceral crunch as her head lolls. 

Addy knows she’s dead and finds herself attempting CPR anyway. She doesn’t actually know how to do CPR. All she knows is from the movies, the medical dramas her mother watches on TV sometimes. 

She performs something she’s never properly learned to do on a dead girl with blue lips she forces her own overtop of, desperately trying to breathe life back into waterlogged lungs. Tacy, predictably doesn’t even twitch beneath her. Addy thumps against her chest until her hands bruise and shoves breath after breath into her slack mouth until her own lungs feel like wrung out dishtowels. 

She isn’t sure when she begins sobbing. Only that at some point, the world blurs before her eyes as they hitch of her, throat gone gummy. Tacy still lies limp and lifeless, phantom pale face speckled with Addy’s boogers and spittle. 

Addy grabs her phone and scrolls through her contacts. For a fraction of a second, her thumb hovers over Beth. 

She thinks, _I just killed Beth’s sister._

Cold claws rake down her spine as her gut lurches and she scrolls past, calling Coach. 

On the third ring, Coach answers. 

“Addy, now isn’t—“ 

“It’s bad, Coach,” Addy croaks, the taste of Tacy’s dead lips thick in her throat. “It’s so bad. Please, I need you right now.” 

A pause. A wary breath. 

“Addy…” 

“It’s bad for both of us, Coach. W-We got caught.” 

A sharp intake of breath. 

“Where the fuck are you?” 

Addy tells her. 

They hang up and for awhile Addy is left to watch the droplets roll from Tacy’s unmoving body. The water washed all the blood from the cut in her forehead, one Addy isn’t sure if from her shoe directly or else something in the grass she kicked Tacy into. Like a sharp stone or a sharp stick. The wound doesn’t bleed anymore and somehow that makes it creepier to look at. 

Guilt seeps through her insides, coats them like thick ichor. She didn’t mean to. She said she would. She was so utterly pissed, she threatened to, but she didn’t actually imagine this. 

Addy never could’ve imagined how indescribably horrible it would be to sit vigil beside a tiny, broken Tacy by the riverbed, at the bottom of the ravine. To know what Death tastes like and taste its ghost lingering in her mouth. To know what Death felt like in her arms as she made her way up the shore and the crepitus taunted her every step. 

“Fuck,” she whispers to no one, burying her head in her arms. 

Eventually Coach is there. 

Coach is there and furious as a hell beast. Coach is there and screaming like something possessed by Satan himself. 

“What the fuck, Hanlon!? What the fuck did you do!?” 

Addy starts sobbing again and she can’t speak through the sobs, ill beyond all reasoning, blubbering like an infant. She violently sobs and sobs, borderline hysterical. Coach keeps cursing and demanding an explanation, voice rising in distress notch by notch. 

Eventually she backhands Addy so hard, her head almost does a full owl’s rotation. 

“Get it together!” Coach kneels in the damp, damp ground and takes Addy’s face in her hands. 

Squeezes so hard, her fingernails pinch into her skin. Somehow it makes Addy feel alive. 

“You can’t afford to be a little bitch right now,” she hisses, a rattlesnake twisted up in satin sheets. “Quit your crying and tell me what the fuck happened.” 

“T-Tacy had a video of us,” Addy splutters, quavering. “I don’t how, she must’ve been there, she, uh…filmed us having sex. She tried to blackmail me with it. So we fought, and I kicked her— I kicked her a lot, s-sh-she ran! She ran right over the edge.” 

Coach swallows, eyes steeling. Mouth folding into a hard, impassive line. 

“I went after her. I tried to save her, but she was facedown,” Addy grates out, utterly defeated. “She was already dead when I pulled her out.” 

“Where’s the video, Addy?” 

Addy slips Tacy's phone out of her hoodie pocket and hands it over to Coach. Coach lets go of her face, takes it and stands up. She shakes the water off of it and furiously punches her fingers at the screen. Addy swallows and looks over to Tacy, traces the periwinkle outline of Tacy’s lips with her eyes. 

Addy knows Coach finds the video when the familiar audio floats from the speakers, garbled, likely from being in the water. 

“Goddamnit,” Coach gasps over the sound of that night’s Addy screaming on the phone. She silences it and swallows, looking back down to Addy. 

“Did she show anyone else?” 

“She didn’t say…I don’t think so. She was using it as leverage against me. She wanted me and Beth to leave the squad.” 

Addy hopes this logic backs it up somehow, that Tacy must’ve kept it to herself. Addy hopes but she has no way of actually knowing. 

“Is this the only copy?” Coach asks next, rage like frostbite. 

“I don’t know,” Addy says, clearing her throat as her voice threatens to crumble away. “She said it wasn’t. She said she had more.” 

Coach chews her fingernail for a moment, brows knitting together as she thinks. Then she winds her arm back and chucks the phone as far as she can. Addy watches it soar through the air. She almost expects it to skip like a rock over the surface of the water. Only it doesn’t. It sinks beneath the same way Tacy had as Addy watched over the edge, with only a splash to indicate it ever was. 

“Roll her back in the water.” 

“W-What?” Addy jolts as if she’s been electrocuted. 

“Roll her back into the water,” Coach repeats, her voice lower now, just a tad shaky. “Accidents happen. This was an accident, Addy. But no one needs to know it was an accident that happened while you were here.” 

“B-But Coach—“ Addy stammers. “Her friends, her family! This is Beth’s half-sister—“ 

“I am well aware of who Tacy is,” Coach growls down at her. “She’s my boss’s daughter. The best JV on my squad when she isn’t disobeying the rules. But we can’t exactly call the cops, Addy. They’ll want to know why you two were out here. Do you want us to get caught, Addy? Do you want to lose me forever?” 

“No…” 

“What about getting charged with manslaughter, Addy? Do you want that?” Coach plants her hands on her hips. “Or what if they don’t believe you, hm? What if they think you did this on purpose?” 

“I-I didn’t!” Addy exclaims, almost begging.

“Murder charges, Addy! Do you want to be tried with murder?” 

“No!” 

The tears spring to her eyes again, hot as acid. Sizzling down her cold, cold cheeks. 

“Roll her into the water,” Coach repeats, almost like she’s instructing a routine. 

Addy turns back to Tacy and gulps. She forces motion out of her nearly frozen limbs and grips Tacy’s even colder body. She can’t bear to actually roll her, can’t stomach the noises she knows her neck would make against the ground. So she picks her up instead, arms trembling under the deadweight. She wades into the river for the second time today and lowers Tacy into the water. 

The river seems to swallow her whole. Muddy brown depths sucking her petite body down. One of her legs bumps against Addy’s as the current carries her away, completely submerged. It’s so nauseating that for a heartbeat, Addy wants to drown herself too. 

She just stands there, distraught, mud seeping into her shoes as the sensation of Tacy in her arms lingers on. So heavy, so slack, so unearthly cold. Despair awakens inside her like hundreds of spiders hatching from an egg sac, skittering and scrabbling, and crawling into every crevice. 

Coach whistles at her. 

“C’mon, hurry up. Matt’s not home. You can shower at my place and then we’re going to talk about this. We have to make sure she’s the only one who knows.” 

Addy numbly moves toward the shore. When she’s close enough, Coach snatches her wrist and yanks her out the rest of the way. 

**Author's Note:**

> Will fix typos when I'm home.
> 
> Title is from A Softer World: 227. 
> 
> _Truth and Beauty are wonderful words but shrapnel is shrapnel and at the end of the day I am alone with the things I have done. (we buried truth under playgrounds)_


End file.
